Arts & Culture

Ever-popular song stylist Tony Bennett was McPartland's guest on Piano Jazz for the first time in 1990. Bennett vocalizes American popular songs like nobody else can. When he was starting out, a voice teacher, Miriam Speier, famous told him: "Don't imitate singers, imitate musicians." So, Bennett decided to emulate Art Tatum. He also credits his relaxed delivery to the inspiration of Mildred Bailey.

You can buy water with electrolytes, minerals or completely "purified." You can buy it with the pH changed to make it alkaline. You can purify your own tap water or even add nutrients back into it. But after seeing a video of a pricey, high-tech filter (about $400 U.S. on sale) that you can monitor with your phone, we wondered, how much of our water filtration fixation is healthy, and how much of it is hype?

Among the small delights corollary to a long bicycle ride is eating, with minimized guilt, a lot of food. Stoke your internal furnace hot enough, and it'll burn through quite a bit. That's true of people who pay to ride bikes — like the NPR crew currently riding RAGBRAI, an annual weeklong bike tour of Iowa, who for years has gone by the backronym No Pies Refused. It's just as true for people who get paid to ride bikes.

The only solid insight to be gleaned from Hot Summer Nights, a nostalgia-soaked coming-of-age drama set in 1991 Cape Cod, is learning the DVDs that doubtlessly line the shelves of its writer-director, Elijah Bynum: Goodfellas, American Graffiti, Boogie Nights, The Sandlot, and perhaps the complete Wonder Years box set, to name a few.

In the opening moments of the 2.5-hour Mission: Impossible — Fallout, producer/stuntman/star Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt shares a tender moment with Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan), the woman for whom he tried to retire from the impossible mission business 12 years and three movies ago, and who's rated only a silent cameo since. Our Man Hunt's reverie is swiftly ended with the arrival of yet another soon-to-self-destruct assignment. This one comes in a hollowed-out book concealing an antique reel-to-reel tape recorder.

We are constantly rewriting our collective history, but few of us can do it with as much devilish glee as Scotty Bowers. Now 95, the onetime Hollywood hustler spent decades during Tinseltown's golden era providing sexual services to the biggest names in town, including Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor and Rex Harrison. He'd rent out a trailer in the back of a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard for $20 per session and also make house calls, sometimes matching the celebrity with his tricks, often jumping into bed with them himself.

"The head hangs down and they don't eat," says Yanez, who immigrated from Mexico two decades ago and has been caring for cattle ever since.

While learning to communicate with animals takes years of patience, Yanez says the true language barrier exists between the dairy workers and the veterinarians who rarely speak Spanish. Medical terminology can be confusing, and to avoid embarrassment, Yanez says she and other workers may feign comprehension.

How odd it is to step into another writer's shoes. To pull on the suit of his most famous character and dance around in it for a little while. You gotta have a reason to do something like that. You've gotta be, for lack of a better word, invested.

Parker Posey is not the kind of movie star who seems distant and unapproachable. Instead, people shout her most famous lines at her when they pass her on the street. "I've gotten 'Air raid!' for, you know, 25 years," she says, referencing 1993's Dazed and Confused. "And Busy Bee, you know — 'Where's my Busy Bee?' From Best in Show," one of five semi-improvised documentary spoof films she's made with the director Christopher Guest.

The future is here and soon it will be toting grocery shoppers around Phoenix.

Walmart and Waymo — formerly Google's self-driving car project — announced on Wednesday the launch of a pilot program that will allow consumers to make their grocery pickups with the help of an autonomous vehicle.